Browsing Lectures - History/Philosophy Science by Title

Although George Orwell made the year 1984 infamous, the very antithesis of intellectual inquiry and achievement, historians, historians of science, and historians of medieval science in particular, have good reason to ...

To understand why natural philosophy played such a fundamental role in medieval intellectual life, we must view it in the context within which it was born in Western Europe. Before the introduction in the twelfth century ...

Scholastic natural philosophers sought to understand the physical world at a time when controlled experiments, systematic observations, and the application of mathematics to physical phenomena, were rare occurrences. They ...

Because the Jesuit order was formed in 1540 and survived as a vibrant and powerful force until 1773, when it was dissolved in Europe, Jesuit natural philosophers found themselves living in a period of enormous scientific ...

Questions or issues discussed in the paper include:
WHAT IS COSMOLOGY?
Descriptions of the structure and operation of the cosmos as it is understood by scholars in any society or civilization.
THE ORIGINS OF COSMOLOGY ...

During the Middle Ages, the relations between science and religion are much more appropriately represented by the relations between natural philosophy and theology. Although there were recognizable sciences in the Middle ...

By the twelfth century, western Europe had developed a hunger for new secular learning. Up to that time, what scholars knew about the physical world was derived from traditional Latin handbooks that contained the remnants ...

In contrast to a paper I did a few years ago on "Science and Theology in the Middle Ages," which focused solely on the Latin Middle Ages and almost exclusively on the period from 1200 to 1500, I shall expand my vistas ...